Tale Of 2 Women:

The Tempest At `Today`

October 13, 1989|By Kenneth R. Clark, Media writer.

Hi. This is Roland Hedley III with a breaking story out of the Big Apple. Jane Pauley left NBC`s ``Today`` show this morning in tears after learning that she will be replaced by actress Barbara Ann ``Boopsie`` Boopstein, whose agent, B.D., reportedly cut a $1.5 million deal for her with the network.

``Today`` show coanchor Bryant Gumbel immediately fired off a memo to senior news vice president Dick Ebersol, who received it three days after it was leaked to the press, saying, ``Didn`t CBS teach us anything with Mariette Hartley?`` Asked about the memo, and about rumors that he now will return to

``Doonesbury`` creator Garry Trudeau hasn`t done it yet, but watch out. The embattled Pauley, reportedly pushed off the ``Today`` show in favor of younger, blonder Deborah Norville, is, after all, Trudeau`s wife and the mother of his three children and he has been known to take umbrage at offenses far less personal in nature.

After weeks of stony silence on the part of an NBC leadership, Pauley finally admitted to Washington Post television critic Tom Shales that she will leave the show over which she has presided with coanchor Bryant Gumbel for 13 years before the end of the year. She will, she said, remain at NBC with

``other duties.``

If her husband should decide to drop a satirical ax on the network in his raffish cartoon strip, it would be a fitting commentary.

The whole fiasco began last March, when a nasty memo was stolen from Gumbel`s personal computer and leaked to the press. It blasted Scott as a camera-hog, who held the show ``hostage`` to bad taste, and it said equally unkind things about almost everybody but Pauley. The memo had been meant only for the eyes of then-executive producer Marty Ryan, but within days the whole country was picking through ``Today`s`` laundry basket.

Now, only days before a scheduled three-day stop in Chicago by the

``Today`` crew-to mark the opening of the NBC Tower-the show is in disarray. Indeed, according to network sources, the chaos off the set even threatens that visit, which is a homecoming of sorts for Gumbel, Pauley and Norville.

Ebersol, who founded ``Saturday Night Live`` and now heads the network`s sports division, was called in by NBC News President Michael Gartner to pour some oil on the roily waters. His solution, promoting Norville from ``NBC News at Sunrise`` and giving her equal billing with Pauley and Gumbel, only roiled the waters more.

Norville, a statuesque blond with a triple-A glamor rating and solid journalism credentials, came to the job with the hearts of the NBC brass obviously in her bank account, along with a reported salary of $1 million a year. She promptly was perceived as wooing Gumbel and eclipsing Pauley, for whom the gossip mill immediately started a death watch.

Pauley, her career at the top of the top-rated morning news show apparently in jeopardy, called in her agent and started talking with the brass about her future, even though, with two years yet to run on her contract, she could be effectively barred from gainful employment at any other network if she decided to take a walk. As the rumor pot came to a rolling boil, the NBC News brass re-created the Berlin Wall, and the normally accessible and gregarious Ebersol crouched behind it in a stony silence.

The stance produced a storm of speculation from closed-out, copy-hungry television writers, who could only speculate on what they thought was happening.

In general, Pauley`s prognosis was deemed gloomy, and Gumbel, as usual, was cast in the role of villain by publications as disparate as the National Enquirer and the Washington Post. The Enquirer headlined the growing fracas

``Back-Stabbing Bryant Gumbel`s Secret Plot to Force Jane Pauley Off

`Today` Show.`` Shales and others started noticing little things on the set.

``Gumbel seems animated and enthused when chatting with Norville, cool and stiff when dealing with Pauley,`` Shales wrote. ``Norville sometimes has a self-satisfied smirk on her face. Like Eve, in `All About Eve.` ``

New York`s Village Voice compared Gumbel and Pauley to ``an unhappily married couple trying to maintain decorum minutes after an argument,`` and Knight-Ridder Newspapers wrote, ``You can`t help noticing that whenever Norville and Gumbel have cohosted without Pauley, Bryant seems relaxed, loose, as if he`s just made short work of an evil back-9 on the golf course. Some pundits speculate that he`s cozying up to Norville because the network brass is so high on her.``

The Los Angeles Times quoted NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff as saying, of Ebersol`s appointment, ``The show needed innovation and new leadership; it seemed to be running on previous momentum.``